declanwmagee

In short - you can always find a better UNC

I'm starting to have some fun with my new copy of Davies, and have managed to score a highish (nEF) 1+A 1887 Shilling at a 1+C price, as most sellers don't distinguish. Davies certainly did, suggesting £28 for top grade 1+A, and £7 for 1+C. Not that the values mean much now but it indicates that he reckoned it was about 4 times as difficult to find a good 1+A as the 1+C. I still have photos for the 9 1887 Shillings that have passed through my hands in the last couple of years, so I went through them and found they were all 1+C. To Davies, it's all about the shape of the tail of the Q in the garter, and Gouby's website concurs. Marvellous. Glancing though CCGB I came across a sidenote about the pointing of the device that separates the 18 and the 87 of the date, so went back through the 9 photos I have and found that they all point between beads. I'm getting quite a taste for pointings, thanks to Mr Groom, so much easier than "a bit bigger" or "a bit narrower" etc. Checking my new 1+A, the device is not between beads but ever so slightly to the right of a bead. So, does anyone know if the pointing of the device CCGB mentions is a direct function of the die letters used by Davies, or was it just chance that all the 1+Cs I've had happened to be "device points between beads". Sorry if that sounds a bit muddled; I had a tooth out yesterday so there's still a bit of brainfizz going on... cheers Declan

Yes, I snapped up the first low grade one I ever saw, like a twit, now I see them all the time...

oh bloody hell! I suppose the nature of this is that completeness is impossible to achieve - not just collecting the coins, but even cataloguing the coins you could get! keep 'em coming!

Short answer: No. Welcome to the Forum!

Ah, brilliant - thanks Badger! It would niggle me if i thought that the 3 kinds of 1887 in my database wasn't quite the full picture, semiautistic coinie that I am...

Modern computer or no, the very last thing you want is a 2Gb Excel spreadsheet; trust me... Excellent tip though - I will be using it!

Here's how I think I'll use it... explanatory pic to show what a 1953 obverse 1 Shilling looks like, for instance:

Actually it's really easy, just very well hidden for some reason. This is what you do: 1. Choose the cell that you want to activate the coin pic. when you mouse-over (if you want separate pics for OBV & REV just use two cells, one for each) 2. Right click on that cell then choose 'insert comment' from the drop down menu 3.The text box which pops up may contain some dummy text which you can just delete. 4. Place your mouse pointer over the BORDER of the box, right click and choose 'Format Comment' from the drop down menu. This is the important bit, because if you right click over the centre of the box you won't get the option to add a pic later! 5. In the Format Comment window that pops up, click on the 'Colours and Lines' tab then click on the down arrow next to Fill Colour to bring up the colours and fill effects. Click on the 'Fill Effects' button at the bottom. 6. In the fill effects window which pops up, you will have a 'Picture' tab which allows you to browse and select a picture from your computer. 7. Finally, you may need to close the Fill Effects window and go back to the Format Comment window to set the size and aspect ratio of the pop-up pic. You can also add some text if you like too. Once you have done the above, a small red triangle will appear in the corner of the cell to show that a pic is available. Very neat! And that's it. Sounds complicated but it's really not. Very cool! Watch out for the size of your file though, every 2Mb pic you stick in will increase the file size by 2Mb, and if you've got 2000 coins...

Pics to make my witterings clearer... "Normal" 1+C to the left, Scarcer 1+A to the right in both cases. Question is, does the loopy Q of 1+C always go with the centred device, or are there device variations for each Q variety, do you think?

I can't remember if it's 1955 or 1957 I've got on a polished blank - probably 1957 as it's a much commoner date in UNC. Well that's jolly interesting - wonder why they would do that? Ties in with reading the 1922 penny thread; there has to be some documentation somewhere detailing what they did and when, if not necessarily why. When I was a suit wearing wage slave I had to submit costed justifications for buying a printer cartridge, so changing the nations coinage must have gone through some written scrutiny, you'd think? I've still never heard any convincing reasoning for the more well known 1961 halfcrown polished flan business...

Yep: Lesson One in this game is that it is not an exact science. People price in all sorts of different ways. Take my humble little shop, for instance. I've got a few coins in there that I have priced ridiculously high because I genuinely don't want to sell them - I just want people to know that I've got one! Other coins I'll price quite low becuase I've got a few of them and I want to get them moving. I bought a tube of UNC 1955 sixpences a while back, for instance, 50 of the little blighters, so I make sure I've always got one in the 99p auctions. doesn't mean they are worth exactly 99p. Some weeks I sell one, some weeks I don't, some weeks they even get a little bid flurry going and I might get £2-£3 for one. Something is worth what someone's prepared to pay. You will see buy it nows from America for all sorts of junk at ridiculous prices - it means nothing. A good tip, perhaps, is to look at Completed Listings (it's a checkbox on the Advanced Search page). That will tell you what prices people have actually achieved for the item you're interested in. Of course, the really exact way to tell is to sell it on a 99p start. It's worth what you get for it!

£15 - £21

You'd have a job to beat Mr Groom's work on the 20th Century, to be honest. Certainly a lot more digestible than Messrs Davies or Freeman.

Is that right, Peter? Available even to a smelly homeless like me? That'd be jolly handy. As it is if I want to buy something on the net I'm tied to fleabay

Best thing to do with these Freddy is see what examples in various grades are going for on ebay - then you can compare with what you have

Welcome Freddy! Coin collecting is a great hobby, and I can't think of a better way to spend a couple of hours while the nipper is asleep. It's also very cool to be thinking ahead about passing the collection down the generations - most of us are here becuase someone did that long ago. Value is a vaguely useful measure of desirability, but that's it, really. The desirability of a coin is so subjective. Imagine you had all the predecimal Elizabeth II halfpennies except the 1962. To you, getting the 1962 to plug the final gap in the set would be more important than it's value might suggest, so you'd pay more than most people would. On paper, the coin is more or less worthless, but every coin is worth something to someone for that reason. I strongly advise you familarise yourself with eBay. Learn what's out there, watch things, particularly items you have in your own collection, and spend a little - a few quid here, a few quid there. Most of the coinies on here are seriously advanced collectors, but don't let that put you off, they all started where you are now. Yes, the thrill of the treasure hunt is a nice part of the hobby, but if we were all honest, it's the thrill of completing sets and series that really floats our boats.

Righto Freddy - forget what they are worth for a start. Coin collecting is never, ever going to make you rich. At the stage you're at, I wouldn't even recommend you get a book yet, just buy whatever looks nice to you (think shiny, but not polished), and don't spend more than a fiver on any one coin. Do that for a few months, and you'll have a collection. By then you'll have a better idea of what you like, and what you find a bit tedious. This is a hobby, it's supposed to be fun, so drop the boring bits and collect more of the nioe stuff. Then buy a book. The book (and by then you'll know which book you want) will start you on the next level...

I'll certainly take the 1956 varieties off your hands 1956 varieties?? Freeman doesn't mention any of them! Ah, just checked Mr Gouby's website. Christ, I'm going to have to get another book... So if we're all getting blown out of the water day in day out, who are these people paying so far over the odds? Do they know something we don't, or are we in the know and they're mugs? Freeman is where I learned of them!! Oh yes, sorry! Just because all my '56s were 3+C I didn't record the others - database error!!

Gorgeous photos, Mr Wybrit, by the way. Any tips for the amateur? I've got a little tripod, a decent camera (not a DSLR), a selection of lights, and I'm quite pleased with my efforts but nothing as good as that.

I'll certainly take the 1956 varieties off your hands 1956 varieties?? Freeman doesn't mention any of them! Ah, just checked Mr Gouby's website. Christ, I'm going to have to get another book... So if we're all getting blown out of the water day in day out, who are these people paying so far over the odds? Do they know something we don't, or are we in the know and they're mugs?

ESC is pretty much your starting and finishing point for the milled series. Davies is a more specialist look at silver coinage but only from the recoinage of George III in 1816. If you can afford it you should buy both. My Davies just arrived and I've spent a marvellous weekend restructuring my coin database as a result. I've had ESC for a while but Davies is a different ball game. I must add though, Mr Groom has done a far better job, and I'll always choose his book over Davies for 20th Century stuff.

let's see now... Peck, which doesn't get used much, but I've had it for ages and I like the smell of it. I do plug Peck numbers into the stupid database for some reason, and I use his rarity ratings as one of the many inputs into my Magic Number, which tries to calculate a numerical answer to the eternal "which is the better coin?" question. ESC, again, for the reference numbers and the rarity ratings Freeman for the more hardcore variety identification Dave Groom's silver book, for even more hardcore varieties Coincraft catalogue from about 2000 - the snippets in there are as close to light reading as my library gets Derek's Grading book pretty much every day for valuing, pricing, and bidding: CCGB (2010) Spink (2009) British Coin Market values (2011) ...and Tony Clayton's website I try and keep those reasonably up to date - it's Spink's turn next as you can see. and I'm waiting on a copy of Davies to be delivered from the US. I actually get more excited waiting for books than waiting for coins.

well done for getting front and back the right way around though! Most people don't...

Very nice - do you stand the coins on edge to take your photos?